


An' Ye Harm None

by EssayOfThoughts



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Childhood Trauma, For the most part, Gen, Magical Accidents, Minor Canon Alteration, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma, Traumatic Magic, Unusual Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-18 07:08:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8153360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: Aberforth and his interaction with magic throughout his life; a character study in seven sections.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Something of a character study with a touch of worldbuilding and an examination of some of his closest and most contentious relationships. In seven sections, for seven is the most magical number, and titled for the Wiccan Rede - the idea that so long as your magic harms no one you should be free to do as you will with it. HP Magic =/= Wiccan magic, but I felt the Rede was something Aberforth would approve of.
> 
> ALSO because I’m #terrible I did this fic last minute in about… five hours and some twenty-thirty odd minutes.
> 
> So, so, _**so**_ many thanks to the truly wonderful [malapropism](http://archiveofourown.org/users/malapropism)/[ababelofprose](http://ababelofprose.tumblr.com/) for being such an absolutely fantastic last minute beta. They're wonderful and everyone should give them some love.

 

 **i.**  
Aberforth is a quiet child. Many people think him stupid for this, when compared to his brother’s bright and obvious brilliance, but they are far from correct. Aberforth is perfectly intelligent, he just uses his brain in other ways than Albus’ blatant intellect. Aberforth watches.

He watches his brother learning magic, mastering it even before he got a wand. He watches their parents, their ready and able use of magic, dancing out of their wands with simple clear direction.

He watches Ariana’s magic, bright and lively, sparking from her fingertips readily.

He looks at his own hands. They are bigger and rougher than his brother’s, more callused than his sister’s. Probably his fault, he thinks, caused by feeding the goats and climbing the tree in the yard. Magic should be able to spark from them too, should be as powerful as his parents, as his siblings. And it can. It can when he really, really wants it to.

But usually he doesn’t. He doesn’t seem to _need_ magic the way his brother does, use it the way his parents do, love it as his sister does. It’s simply there in his hands, a welcome ability but nowhere near as great as it is in other’s hands.

All the same, despite so little a view of magic he knows how it can feel to use it. Knows how he and Albus use it to patch each other up when they get into a fight-

(“Hold _still,_ let me do this Abe,” Albus says, pushing Aberforth’s hands away from his twisted ankle, cupping his own around it. There’s a moment of warmth, so bright it is almost-pain and then the sensation almost as though Albus has twisted his ankle back to how it should be. He knows Healing magic is difficult, and Wandless magic even more, but… well, Albus _is_ the prodigy.

(He pushes Albus’ hands away from his own skinned knee, his own bloodied nose. He may not be as _good_ with magic as his brother, but it’s still _there_ when he wants it. A cupped hand, a moment of warmth and Albus’ knee is healed to new pink flesh, his nose no longer drips blood.

(“There’s still the bruises though,” Aberforth says. “We’ll have to say we ran into a bludger!”)

-how he uses it to soothe Ariana to sleep, how their parents use it every. Single. Day. filling their home with magic so simply and readily that he (and Albus, he knows Albus can because Albus is the prodigy) can almost _feel_ it.

Magic is like life - a part of theirs, affecting theirs - constantly. Magic is a great thing.

 

* * *

 

 **ii.**  
He has to sing Ariana to sleep a lot after the… .

They don’t talk about it. The last time they did Father had left, and then, the next day, been dragged away by Aurors. The last time they did Ariana had curled up in a ball by the window, eyes red and weeping, and had run into the goatshed when Father had stomped out.

The last time they did, Mother had yelled at he and Albus to “Go to your rooms! And _no supper!”_

They’d never had a punishment that bad, even when they’d let out Ms. Bagshot’s Crup when the muggles were all in the street and she was at market. (It had bitten seventeen people and the Ministry had put it down. And they _still_ hadn’t been punished as badly.)

He’s the one to go out to the goatshed-

(“I don’t mind, Mother, I don’t mind the smell, and it’s not like Ariana listens to _Albus.”)_

(“Be nice to your brother, Aberforth, he’s gone through a lot too.”)

-and get Ariana. He’s the one to gently tease her into a hug, to sing her nonsense songs to make her smile. He’s the one to sing her to sleep, because even though his singing voice is _terrible_ -

(“You sound like a drowning Kneazle,” Albus had said, and Aberforth had brained him with an eraser.)

-he’s the only one to know the lullabies she likes and he’s the only one who knows how to sing with magic in his voice and soothe all her worries away.

This is what magic is, after… . After. A risk.

 

* * *

 

 **iii.** **  
** Aberforth doesn’t mind staying at home. Oh, there’s all that business about his “magical education,” (said in Albus’ bloody prissy voice, with the insistence that he could _do so much_ and _be so much more than…_ **_this_ ** ) but he can learn from Mother and when she dies (it’s devastating, when she dies, but Aberforth has other things to worry about: namely, Ariana, even more terrified of herself than usual now her blasts of magic have _killed_ someone) he can learn from books.

He reads the books to Ariana sometimes. Not the spellbooks, those tend to make her cry - she can’t _do_ magic like that even at the best of times, she even has trouble with potions unless he’s there to help her through every step, and it just seems unfair to tell all that she can never have, now - but the potions books and the books on herbs and plants and creatures. She loves _A Thousand and One Magical Herbs and Fungi_ and she especially loves _A Compleat Booke of Beastes_ (and half of the creatures mentioned within Aberforth thinks are complete hogwash, but he isn’t going to tell her that when they make her smile light up the very room). He reads, until he’s pretty sure he’s read more books and reads books better than Albus.

When Mother dies Albus comes home, even though Aberforth has been managing everything for years now, with Albus off doing Albus-y things, being _smart_ and _prodigal_ all over Europe and making friends at the Ministry and with the other purebloods ready for when he leaves Hogwarts, and honestly, it could make Aberforth _hurl_ that Albus, great, wonderful, _perfect_ Albus is off doing so much when “You know what, it would be really helpful if you could come down when I have to muck out the goats because Mother is so sick she can’t watch Ariana _and we could really bloody well use another pair of hands here, Al._ ”

(“Language, Abe, _language._ I’ll see if I can visit next week.”)

(“We aren’t mucking out the goats _next week,_ Al, we’re mucking them out _now,”_ but the flames have gone from green to orange and Aberforth doesn’t know why he bothers.)

Albus comes home and what could have been wonderful quickly turns sour under Albus’ controlling hands.

With Albus home Ariana gets worse. She shouldn’t, by rights. Having Albus home should make things _better,_ but Mother is gone now and Albus is being _awful_ and Ariana can _see_ that he and Albus don’t get along anymore and it worries her so much she spends half of her time with the goats.

(“They understand,” Ariana whispers to Aberforth when he comes to fetch her inside and he’s pretty sure she’s wrong - the goats aren’t scared of anything and at least twice when he was younger and he tried to scare the goats he’d ended up being the one running away - but they make her feel better so he starts leaving a jar of loose feed by the door so she can grab it when she goes out to sit with them.

(The goats get almost worryingly plump before Aberforth decides to cut back on their regular meals. He still worries though, because they’re only getting so fat because Ariana sits with them so often and _that_ is a cause for worry.

(“Let me manage it,” Aberforth tells his brother over and over again. “You’re scaring Ariana.”)

Magic has become this to them - a twisted thing, that Albus is proud of and Ariana fears and Aberforth _hates_ because it’s causing them all so much trouble.

 

* * *

 

 **iv.**  
Aberforth could almost be glad when Gellert turns up at their door, asking if he could borrow some valerian root and a cup of sugar for “My aunt, Bathilda? I’m staying with her a while, I’ve just come from Durmstrang” and drags Albus into a lengthy discussion on different runic systems depending on region and doesn’t leave until his aunt comes over to drag him home again.

Aberforth could _almost_ be glad of it except that Gellert is giving Albus Ideas and he, more than most, know how dangerous a thing that is. Albus with Ideas is Dangerous. Albus with Ideas will say outlandish things, behave in outlandish ways. Albus with Ideas will say something with no idea of just how much it hurts.

Albus with Ideas is, if anything, as bad as Ariana when her magic explodes out of her after a nightmare, except Aberforth can’t talk Albus down and coax him into pulling his words back from the world and undoing the damage as he would Ariana with her magic.

“Well obviously,” Gellert says, walking around the garden (Ariana, thankfully, is inside, in her room, reading _A Compleat Booke of Beastes_ for the fiftieth or more time). “We with magic have a responsibility to those without, we can heal and help, we can protect, we can do so much that they can’t. Of _course_ we should rule, we are meant to with all we can do. It’s not the muggles’ _fault,_ of course not, but they simply aren’t as prepared for the world as we are. We must act as parents for them, protect them from the magical creatures and diseases of the world that they would have no defence against.”

Aberforth doesn’t mention how muggle _gonnes_ and _cannons_ can take down a Nundu. Doesn’t mention how this kind of superiority is the exact same way purebloods have viewed muggles for centuries. Doesn’t mention how this kind of patronising paternalism is going to be _exactly_ what Albus expresses towards Ariana at dinner until Albus _does_ and it explodes out of him in anger.

 _(“She’s not a_ **_child_ ** _, stop treating her as one!”_

_(“She can’t take care of herself, Aberforth, what else would you call her?”_

_(“Our Goddamned sister, that’s what! Who you’ve not been helping with your patronising comments and condescension, who you’ve been making_ **_worse_ ** _with your constant control of the house! She’s not_ **_stupid._ ** _She can hear every word you share with him and see how you apply them to her and-”_

 ** _(“STOP!”_** and it’s shouted, Ariana’s hands slamming into the table with all of the force of a blacksmith’s hammer, tears streaming down her face. “I’m _right here.”_

(They feel like Mother just sent them to bed with no supper, right then.)

Ariana takes to painting, to putting the gramophone on as loudly as possible and drowning out even him. The only time she doesn’t is to feed the goats and Aberforth doesn’t dare suggest that she turn the gramophone down, doesn’t dare suggest she have to _listen_ to Gellert and Albus’ discussions, to his and Albus’ arguments.

Sometimes, when Aberforth goes up to keep an eye on her, or to avoid Albus, or to call her down to dinner, she isn’t painting with a paintbrush. Sometimes it’s with her fingers, sometimes it’s with her _magic,_ hurling paint at the canvas in odd bizarrely controlled splatters. Sometimes she’s just sketching, little moving pieces of art, butterflies from the garden, or the new Billy Goat they bought from the Cadair Idris Dwarves.

Somehow, with art and music, Ariana drowns out everything - every horrible discussion and horrific argument and shouted dispute until the day she doesn’t.

The day she dies.

They never know who cast the spell. Aberforth wants to think it was Gellert with his Dark Magic, fears it was Albus, learned from Gellert, fears, even more than that, that it was _him_ by accident. He knows they could check, could borrow Bathilda’s Pensieve, but…

Gellert is gone and it’s not like they could find him and bring him to justice if it was him. It’s not like either of them are ready to face the idea that their sister, fourteen years old and trying, once again, to pull herself out of the way her magic was turning inwards and tripping her up, trying, once again, to work past the way others treated her and talked of her, has died at their hands.

So they don’t look. They don’t find out. They both wallow in guilt. Albus leaves and oh, Aberforth _is_ glad then, doesn’t know what he’d do to his brother if he’d stayed.

(He does know. He breaks Albus’ nose at Ariana’s funeral. He’d do it again, and again, and _again_ and he’d do worse if he was allowed to build up any kind of steam.)

It isn’t until Aberforth gets home from the funeral that he finds the portrait. Tucked in Ariana’s wardrobe, where her dress robes had been before she’d been buried in them. A portrait of her, waiting for a single tap of his wand to wake up and wave.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, because there isn’t anything else he can say. Ariana-in-the-portrait frowns at him and shakes her head, shakes her finger at him reprovingly. Her hands move and… for a moment Aberforth doesn’t quite recognise the sign-language they’d used on the days Ariana had been non-verbal because it’s only two dimensional now.

 _You took care of me,_ Ariana’s hands are signing. _And now you should take care of other people. Better than you did me._

Magic stays one thing, for Aberforth, with the portrait as a constant reminder. It remains dangerous.

 

* * *

 

 **v.**  
Aberforth doesn’t know why Ariana’s portrait is silent, but he has his theories. Ariana’s magic was different and how she painted was different and so _obviously_ her portrait would be different. Ariana’s portrait is perfectly silent, but signs faster than Ariana’s shaking fingers in life could ever have. Sometimes Aberforth wonders if Ariana painted her portrait to sign better, sometimes he wonders if the portrait signs better because she’s not so worried now there isn’t her wild magic constraining her.

Sometimes Ariana’s portrait feels so very real and alive he wonders if she put some part of her soul into it.

The portrait is the only thing he takes with him other than the goats when he buys the Hog’s Head. “The Hog’s Head,” he tells Ariana’s portrait, hanging it up in the new place, “like the hogwash songs I used to sing you, eh?”

Aberforth likes the pub. It’s quiet for the most part - he thinks the smell of the goats contributes to that - but he has the money from selling the house in Godric’s Hollow to fall back on when business is especially slow, and the money from selling the goat’s milk. He lets the Billy Goat he got from the Dwarves out at night, because nothing seems to scare would-be-thieves away like a waist-high, horned and bleating shadow.

He doesn’t know how many wizards George-the-goat might have headbutted in the crotch but he doesn’t care if it keeps his pub safe.

(Well, he does care exactly once, when George headbutts Albus coming down to visit.)

(He laughs so hard he wakes Ariana’s portrait.)

He likes to watch people, at the pub. Watch the unusual customers - because that’s who tends to come to a quiet pub in a purely magical village: the unusual ones, the weird people. He watches them and takes note of the Hags and Ogres, of the two Vampires that come in for the blood-cider he bought out of curiosity and keeps getting because they buy it, of the scarred Veela girl who shaved her head and tattooed her scalp and can make her feathers come out with the slightest twitch after one shot of White Rat.

“How do you do it?” he asks Denise - for that is her name - one evening. “Just… twitch your fingers like that. I thought Veela had to be _angry._ ”

“That is the secret, my friend,” Denise says, talon-like nails tapping sharply on wood her feathers only brush over. “I am always angry.”

She’s quiet the next few visits, doesn’t do her trick, until, one evening, terribly drunk she goes, “They hate us, you know? All of them, out there.” She waves at Cornix and Vulpecula in the corner, drinking their blood-cider, then at Raum the Ogre and at Elisabetta the Hag. “They hate us, the leeches and the lumpies and the child-eaters.” She pauses, gestures to herself. “The pretty bitches who won’t give them the time of day. They hate us all, and they hate us more when we ignore them or avoid them or hate them back for it.”

Her taloned fingers draw down her face, over her scars and Aberforth hadn’t noticed how perfectly spaced they were, like fingers, how the ones on her shoulder look as perfectly neat as a Cutting Curse.

“Did-” he half-asks, because he remembers all too clearly how Ariana responded when they’d tried to ask what had happened.

Denise’s eyes are as yellow as a hawk’s as she looks at him. She taps her shot glass on the bar, once, a soft ringing sound, and Aberforth hurries to pour her another shot.

“There’s a reason I shaved my hair,” she says. “A reason I tattooed my scalp. There’s a reason I wear a hooded cloak even in summer and it’s because I _won’t give those bastards something pretty to stare at._ ” She downs her shot, spits in her glass. “I’m a _person,”_ she says and for a moment Aberforth hears it again, Ariana’s hands slamming down on the table, her cry of _I’m_ **_right here!_ **

“You deserve respect too,” Aberforth says, and pulls out a fresh glass, a proper sized whisky tumbler instead of the shot glasses Denise usually has her whisky in. He fills it, almost to the brim and slides it to her. “On the house,” he says, “And on my bloody wizarding society.”

The smile Denise gives him is beaked and sharp as she downs it.

They don’t have an outburst like that again, not from any of his regulars, but they settle to an understanding. No one has to say anything they don’t want to, and if someone’s had a rough day dealing with _the bloody Ministry_ (as Elisabetta so often does) or _them arsehole purebloods_ (as Raum always does) or _the fucking Aurors_ (as Cornix and Vulpecula do) they get at least one large drink for free.

Denise is the first one he invites upstairs and introduces to Ariana, but the others come soon enough. It becomes a special club, really, those he introduces to Ariana and there’s a pattern - they’re all non-humans with more understanding than any witch or wizard.

It’s Cornix who sidles up to him one New Year’s - they’re in his room in the back, Ariana watching from the portrait, all smiles and flurries of signs to Denise and Vulpecula - and quietly clinks his glass of mulled wine to Aberforth’s.

“Your sister,” he says, quietly. “I’ve heard of cases. In Europe, Grindelwald-”- and for a moment Aberforth very nearly drops his mug to hear the name- “-The experiments in some of his castles, there are children whose magic also functions… oddly. Many of them were squibs for whom it was simply… passive magic, but for others… there were twins, one who can influence minds easily, one who can heal so quickly. And then several other children, muggle borns and one metamorphmagus. But there have been studies on these. I could get you copies, if you would like?”

Aberforth thinks that if it wasn’t for the fact that Cornix is a Vampire he might almost have broken his hand with the force he grabbed it.

The papers arrive a week later, Cornix and Vulpecula both almost bowed down by the weight of the stacks they haul in.

“I think,” Vulpecula says after setting down her stack with a _thump,_ “That might have been payback for the time I almost staked you, _frater-sanguis.”_

“Just _maybe, soror-sanguis,”_ Cornix says, setting his own stack down. “But at least we can say we have made up for every single Christmas for Aberforth with these.”

Reading the studies Aberforth learns more about magic than he’d ever hoped - certainly more than he’d learned scowling at his brother’s antics through Grindelwald’s war and now Voldemort’s.

Magic is _other,_ bizarre and complex and not nearly pinned so neatly into those precise controlled rules the Professors liked to pretend it was.

 

* * *

 

 **vi.**  
The first time Neville Longbottom stumbles out from behind Ariana’s portrait Aberforth very nearly lets George into the house for the first time since the chair-eating incident. As it ends up, he doesn’t but he does warn Neville of George’s existence, in case the boy gets any Ideas about sneaking into his pub in the middle of the night or something.

Instead, he sits down the shaking boy - because at just-barely-seventeen Neville might be trying to be a man and the laws of magical Britain may say he’s an adult but with his own experience and the newly vague knowledge of whatever horrible things are going on at his brother’s old school Neville is most certainly a _boy_ \- and presses a bottle of Butterbeer into his hands, pushes a plate of sandwiches onto the table in front of him.

“Lemme see you,” he says, gruff because it’s been years since he’s tried this, but he presses his hands to Neville’s black eye and sliced open forehead and split lip and heals each injury how he’d used to heal Albus.

“What’s goin’ on up there?” he asks when Neville’s finished and is draped in a blanket. “What in the bloody hell are they doing to my brother’s school?”

He lets Neville keep on coming down for food, but sends him back up with the spare cauldron spelled-to-stay-hot and full of beef stew and dumplings, a large wedge of cheese, half a loaf of bread and a case half of butterbeer and half of flasks of water.

“I can’t carry all of this,” Neville says and Aberforth just smiles, almost sadly.

“You have your magic still,” he says, “And you can control it still.” He claps a hand onto Neville’s shoulder. “Make the most of that while you can, Sonny-Jim.”

He meets the other kids of the DA over that year, all of them from oldest to youngest. The oldest are mostly fine, magic long tamed to wands, and the prim and perfect control the Ministry so prefers but the youngest… . Hell, half of the youngest aren’t really DA members, just kids the DA wouldn’t leave to suffer.

There’s at least three kids like Ariana, magic turning inwards and outwards, warping in weird ways, ready to explode at the slightest provocation. Three kids that he knows Ariana loves and pities in equal measure and to whom she signs constantly every time they visit until they can each sign back. There’s four with cases similar to ones he’d read about in the Grindelwald case studies and then there’s _fifteen more_ with cases perfectly unique. There’s eleven-year-old Nessie who burns like a Phoenix when scared or hurting, there’s Alexandra and Patroclus who can read the minds of just about anyone in a ten metre radius and have a tendency to run hand-in-hand. There’s Joanie whose ability to calm people extends even to Denise in the front room and keeps her from doing her trick for a week and a half until Aberforth tentatively lets them meet.

There’s Darius who puts out every candle and torch and hearth in the building and has burns over each of his limbs and collarbones, and Sammy who can see the future and _is seeing_ the future ten seconds ahead 80% of the time which makes conversations _really_ weird until they get used to Aberforth and calm enough to settle (mostly) in the present. There’s twelve-year-old Adara and twelve-and-a-half William and the eldest of all the kids with traumatic magic, thirteen-year-old Lyra who always seems on the cusp of Apparating even though she’s _thirteen_ and shouldn’t be able to even come close within the walls of Hogwarts. She does Apparate as soon as she arrives at the pub, dotting around the building five times in ten seconds until she finally settles curled in the nook behind the woodpile.

Aberforth finds it oddly fitting that its Ariana’s portrait that links these kids to his pub. Kids and his sister to whom magic was nothing but a constant and ever-present danger.

 

* * *

 

 **vii.**  
After the war Aberforth ends up taking in half of the kids. Some of them lost their parents during the year, some lost them in the final battle, other kids, still, had been met by parents scared of what their magic now did and a school which didn’t know how to teach them. In the case of Alexandra and Patroclus, they were met by Alexandra’s half-magical parents and Patroclus’ pureblood ones not knowing what to do with two children that lived inside each other’s heads as much as they did the minds around them.

So Aberforth took them, and enlarged the space in the upstairs storage rooms so he could give them all space to live and read and grow.

Generally they stay upstairs. Some of them read the studies Cornix and Vulpecula gave him, some of them sit with Denise and learn how to use anger to control their explosions of magic as much as cause them. Lyra likes to sit with Raum, so huge and hulking and gentle that the other kids can run around screaming and she doesn’t feel a need to Apparate halfway across the village. Sometimes, they help him feed the goats.

Sometimes, things like this happen.

“Hey,” Aberforth says, cradling the girl’s hands in his own. Her fingertips are sparking magic, bright and fierce and burning, enough that were his hands not so callused with age he’d surely burn. “Hey now.” His voice is soft, as gentle as if he were speaking to ill old George. “What’s up, what’s the matter?”

He can see the tears beading in her eyes, the redness and the frownlines and the way her mouth is turned down to know that _someone_ has said something, and he quietly, firmly, glares at the children behind her, scanning them until he sees- _there._ The guilty ones.

Nessie - Clytemnaestra Aceso Sorrows, what _were_ her parents thinking Aberforth would never guess, probably whatever train of thought had named his brother and he - is only thirteen years old. Two years from the last time someone cast _Crucio_ at her, meaning to make her scream and now-

Now, instead of screaming she sparks when she is hurting, sparks out magic like flames and fireworks, can burn herself up into an inferno if someone tries to scare her.

Can burn brighter than a Phoenix, bright as the _sun_ if someone so much as mentions the Cruciatus to her.

“I hope,” Aberforth says clearly, “everyone remembers that Nessie is fully capable of burning through _stone_ when triggered.” He rises, slowly, from his crouch, lets one hand rest in Nessie’s as her hiccups soften into control, as the sparks ease to just the softest glow at her fingertips. “And that the Unforgiveables are _never_ a joking or teasing matter.”

In a moment, he knows, Nessie will run inside, tuck herself into her books and force herself to control her sparking magic lest she burn the pages. Darius and Joanie will follow her, sit softly at her shoulders as warm comfort, Darius’ magic countering her fire, Joanie’s ability to calm anyone rising up in response to her friend’s fear.

Yet there were still the guilty ones.

He waits for the other children to disperse, keeps an eye on the two that did this, almost pinning them in place. Sometimes he wonders if that is its own kind of trauma-magic, his wish as Ariana had died that he might hold people still in time and place, stop them from moving and hurting and harming. He knows Albus could do something similar, pin people in place and seem as though he were peeling back their skin and muscle and bone and looking into their brains. Sometimes he thinks it is simply their mother’s eyes and all her bright fierceness coming through.

“Xandra,” he says, watching the pair. “Patroclus.”

He knows these two, knows how their magic has mutated from trauma - wariness, constant wariness making their minds stretch in ways that took adults months and years to master, making them master Legilimens at fourteen years old. Half the time they don’t even _mean_ to do harm, but are called bullies by the other children for the words that slip out and cause harm all the same and, well.

 _Speak of the devil and he shall appear_ is the muggle saying, _no prophecy comes true like a prophecy heard_ is the magical. Once an idea is heard it has a frustrating penchant for coming true.

“We didn’t mean to,” Alexandra says.

“But it was in her head,” Patroclus adds.

“It just,” they say together.

“Slipped,” (Alexandra)

“Out.” (Patroclus)

Aberforth sighs, crouches down before them. “I know,” he says gently. “Maybe spend some time with Sammy. Start seeing how the future will happen and then _don’t.”_

“The future,” Alexandra says, and Aberforth has noticed how she’s always the one to speak first.

“Says we’re,” Patroclus says.

“Going to be _horrible.”_ They say the last together, with twin expressions of distaste.

“You don’t have to be,” Aberforth says. “You’re people too. You get to choose too.”

He lets the thoughts run slowly across the surface of his mind, lets them _see_ or _hear_ or however it is they perceive minds. Everything is a choice. Magic might have changed for them, but they can heal. Magic might be different now, but they can use that potential. He thinks of Ariana, thinks of just how much she was - and is, in her portrait - loved.

Magic is so much now, to them all. From danger and trauma to healing and potential to, really, absolutely _everything._

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Amongst other things there is, in this fic:
> 
> \- One (1) MCU reference.  
> \- One (1) pretentious reference to [This Fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5465246) by this very author.  
> \- Several (#??) incidences of this author winging it with canon accidental magic capabilities.  
> \- Way Too Many (#????) incidences of this author having Emotions.
> 
> Feel free to come and yell at me on [tumblr](http://essayofthoughts.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
